Archie The Wonder Dog

Thanks for popping in to see my entry in the Bloggers' Quilt Festival.  I haven't managed many finished quilts since the last festival (no surprise there!) and didn't think I'd be entering this time round, but Nicky reminded me about the mini category and so here I am! I made this little quilt, 'City Walk' (naming quilts isn't something I usually do but I felt that participating in a blog hop and designing a pattern for Oakshott warranted a quilt name!) in July when I was part of an Oakshott blog hop  and is designed around the traditional 'walking triangles' block.  I wrote a rather  ridiculously long tutorial for it as part of the blog hop and you can find that here , should you wish to make your own version. The quilt is made from a F8 bundle (plus a piece of wadding and a piece of fusible fleece) and I decided that I wanted to make something useful as well as decorative so this little quilt also doubles as a block roll (to keep piec

On the second Tuesday of each month, Nicky and Leanne  are hosting a scrappy linky party, entitled 'Scraptastic Tuesday'.  You can link up a blog post or Flickr photo (and possibly an Instagram photo but as I'm not on IG I'll leave that to the rest of you to work out!) about a scrappy project or scrap sorting system and you'll have a chance to win a prize from one of their sponsors.  Why not join in?  They've done something clever (I think it might be magic) with the linky party and you can link up to the same party from either of their blogs.  This month you have two weeks to add your link. We're approaching the end of the current year with Bee A Brit Stingy (the second year of the bee and my first year as a proper bee) and our penultimate Queen Bee is Catherine , who chose scrappy blog cabin blocks as her block.  She asked for the blocks to be the classic dark and light log cabin blocks; two of the blocks needed to have a dark side made from brigh

I think I may have been visited by madness when compiling this list.  For the last couple of months I've been adding projects as I thought about/remembered them and all of a sudden I seem to have the most enormous list of things I'd like to get finished.  Fortunately, my natural realism has reasserted itself and I know I'm not going to get all of these finished in three months (or even half of them in double the time!) but I'm going to give it a good go! Pin cushion I'm in need of a new pin cushion and am going to make a larger version of the small EPP Japanese pin cushions I've made in the past.  This would be a good evening project, I just need to bury my complete dislike of EPP for a fortnight or so!! Dresden little quilt This gorgeous fabric is going to become a Dresden plate which will then be turned into a little quilt for my sewing room wall - I think I'm going to add some embroidery around the edge (and possibly in the centre), if I c

This is my final finish for this quarter and is, once again, something small! Back in July, when I wrote my FAL Q3 list , I included my first piece of hardanger, which looked almost finished but in fact had the nerve-racking cutting out still to be done, as well as the needle weaving and dove's eye stitches to finish off: It's only a small piece of hardanger - that's a 4" hoop! By the end of July I had a finish, just not a blog post about that finish (no change there, then!) and, although it's only small, I do love it and can honestly say there's more work in it than you'd think to look at it!! It's a surprisingly hard thing to photograph and I completely forgot to take a photo of the hardanger before I stitched it onto the strawberry, so I'm afraid these photos will have to do! I think the strawberry is about 1.5" high and the hardanger is somewhere around 1.5" across its widest point - quite small but n

Another item on my FAL Q3 list  was to turn these fabrics (half a metre of each) and this trim (all brought back from France by a friend) into a simple tote bag: I used this as another distraction activity while Archie was poorly but again I couldn't be away from him for long as the whines were really quite mournful and he kept getting distressed.  I'd like to blame this for a certain 'design feature' inside the bag...you'll see what I mean in a moment! I decided to keep the bag as simple as possible, just a straightforward tote bag for carrying parcels to the post office, etc. and so I kept nipping upstairs to cut fabric or sew a seam, in between sitting in front of Archie's cage and reassuring him that everything was okay.  After an afternoon of nipping, stitching and unpicking (that sounds like a sewing class in an infant class, doesn't it?!) I had a bag! And now it's time to reveal my 'design feature'.  I made the outsi